How to put my kernels, initrd and entries in the boot/XBOOTLDR partition

s0dyy · May 15, 2022, 5:32pm

Hello,

I just switched to NixOS, and I can’t find the option (if it exists), to put my kernels, initrd and entries in my boot / XBOOTLDR partition.

On my old Linux distributions, I was following the systemd recommendations, which you can find here:

https://systemd.io/BOOT_LOADER_SPECIFICATION/

I have two partitions, /efi and /boot. I used the “boot.loader.efi.efiSysMountPoint = “/efi”” option at installation, everything works fine, and my hardware-configuration.nix file looks very good.

But I don’t have the expected result, my /boot partition contains only empty folders (EFI, machine-id, loader…), without my kernels, initrd and entries… Which are in my /efi partition… (and having several operating systems on my machine, I wish to have all my kernels/initrd on my XBOOTLDR partition, sorted neatly by machine-id folder).

I did not find a reference to the XBOOTLDR partition in the documentation / manual. Are there people in the same situation as me? Is there an option to configure this properly?

I’ll keep looking, hoping to get some feedback

s0dyy · May 15, 2022, 6:24pm

I had a quick look at the code of system-boot-builder.py.

github.com

NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/ea69f79829972187ecf6c1eaede4ce7a15d81736/nixos/modules/system/boot/loader/systemd-boot/systemd-boot-builder.py

#! @python3@/bin/python3 -B
import argparse
import shutil
import os
import sys
import errno
import subprocess
import glob
import tempfile
import errno
import warnings
import ctypes
libc = ctypes.CDLL("libc.so.6")
import re
import datetime
import glob
import os.path
from typing import NamedTuple, List, Optional

class SystemIdentifier(NamedTuple):

This file has been truncated. show original

All configuration is done via “@efiSysMountPoint@” (so the /efi partition in my case).

I guess it’s not possible to do a clean ESP / XBOOTLOADER installation. Can anyone confirm this?